Over on the photo sharing service Flickr, I’m noticing a bunch of photos from this week’s Britain Yearly Meeting session. One contributor has tagged (labelled) all her photos with “britainyearlymeeting06” which means they’re all available on one page. Cool, but what would be even cooler is if every Flickr user at the event used the same tag. We’d then have a nearly real-time group photo essay of the yearly meeting sessions.
So this year I’m going to tag all my personal photos from next month’s Friends General Conference Gathering of Friends as “FGCgathering06″. I invite any other Flickr-using attenders to do the same. While I do work at FGC, please note this is not any sort of official FGC decision, it’s just my own idea to share photos and to see how we can use these online networks to share and promote Quakerism. In a few weeks you’ll start seeing entries via flickr and technorati. I’ll probably start with a few pictures of the bookstore truck being loaded for its cross-country trek. Update: one embedded below.
Blog posts:
If your blogging system doesn’t support the use of tags, then simply add this line in the bottom of each of your Gathering-related posts:
FGCgathering06
Update: here’s one:
Why limit it to Flickr? What about blog posts and other taggable items?
And, while I understand your caution about speaking on behalf of FGC, I think that for tagging to really be effective, there has to be some consensus-building and/or decreeing of appropriate tags. Nonprofit tech groups (among others, I’m sure — I’m just aware of those) are already doing this — the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network promoted the ntc06 tag for this year’s conference, and you can see the results on Technorati and Flickr. Similarly the net2 tag from the NetSquared conference that TechSoup just put on. Most of these also carry the widely used nptech tag that nonprofit technologists have adopted more organically.
So if there’s still a daily Gathering newsletter, write about your intention there! I bet there are more Friends engaging in taggable activity than one might initially think.
Cheers,
Thomas
Hi Thomas, sure: why not, I’ll tag all my relevant content with this (including retagging this here post). It’s easy to get a bunch of techies uniting on tags but the herd of cats that is FGC Gathering committees?? (I mean that nicely: I’m a cat person!).
I’ll ask around about putting a little blurb in the daily Gathering bulletin. Why not? It’s kind of sobering to see that even with “ntc06’s” imprimatur and consensus they only got five bloggers and four Flikr posters to use the tag. This is perhaps more of a neat idea than a socially-workable reality.